Vol. 46:3

A close rabbinic reading of the Jacob-Esau cycle argues that the brothers' conflict was never simply good versus evil but a contest over two legitimate, distinct spheres of leadership — Jacob's over the spiritual realm and Esau's over the material one. Tracing the sale of the birthright, Isaac's blessings, Jacob's wrestling match at Peniel, and the brothers' reunion and final parting, the article contends that Jacob ultimately renounces the blessing of worldly dominion as mismatched to his character, restoring it to Esau, while the brothers separate in mutual, if hard-won, recognition of each other's God-given path.

A sequel to the author's study of the biblical lists of Canaanite nations, this article gathers rabbinic traditions that the Girgashites voluntarily fled the Holy Land before Joshua's conquest — settling, according to various sources, in Africa, Phrygia, or even Spain, France, or Germany — as an explanation for their frequent absence from those lists. It then examines how the term 'Canaanite' can denote either the Canaanite super-nation as a whole or, per Nahmanides, a narrower nation descended from Canaan's firstborn Sidon, and closes by weighing rabbinic and academic explanations for why the Holy Land itself came to be called the 'Land of Canaan.'

Nahshon ben Amminadab looks like a minor figure in the Torah, yet midrashic literature gives him outsized prominence. This article argues that a close reading of Numbers 7 — the seemingly misplaced and out-of-order story of the tribal chieftains' inaugural offerings — reveals that Nahshon's willingness to bring the first sacrifice after the deaths of Nadab and Abihu explains why his tribe, Judah, was chosen to lead the camp toward Canaan. It then shows how Rabbi Yehudah's midrash about Nahshon leaping first into the Red Sea transposes this same character trait onto an earlier, silent moment in Exodus, and traces the trait through Caleb and David as a recurring mark of Judahite leadership.

Reading the ninth plague's three biblical gradations of darkness alongside classical commentators who link blindness to fear (Ibn Ezra, Abravanel), the authors propose that the plague of darkness described in Exodus 10:21–23 is best understood as a case of collective hysterical (conversion-disorder) blindness rather than, or alongside, a literal absence of light. Drawing on medical literature on transient visual loss, amaurosis fugax, and post-traumatic blindness, and on social-psychological accounts of anxiety in large groups, they argue that eight prior plagues had already traumatized the Egyptian population to the point where a further, culturally and psychologically induced blindness became possible.

Examining the three biblical episodes of the dead being revived — the son of the widow of Zarephath, the son of the Shunammite woman, and the man thrown into Elisha's grave — this article finds that Jewish commentators, including Maimonides, almost never sought naturalistic explanations for these miracles. The one partial exception, the claim that the widow's son was never truly dead, arose not from discomfort with the miracle itself but from a halakhic difficulty about Elijah's priestly status, showing that classical Jewish exegesis treated resurrection as no more extraordinary than any other biblical wonder.

Reading the biblical Sabbatical and Jubilee legislation — debt remission, release of patrimonial land, and the freeing of slaves with provisions to start afresh — as more than a utopian ideal, this article argues that the principles behind these laws, rather than their literal observance, offer a template for modern economic recovery. Surveying the Jubilee 2000 debt-forgiveness movement and its critics, and drawing on the traditional Yoruba ethic of collective family responsibility, the author proposes that these biblical principles of release and communal support speak directly to Nigeria's contemporary economic recession.

A review of Textual History of the Bible: The Hebrew Bible, Volume 1B (Pentateuch, Former and Latter Prophets) and Volume 1C (Writings), edited by Armin Lange and Emanuel Tov (Brill, 2017). The review highlights the volumes' book-by-book textual histories and comparisons among the proto-Masoretic Text, the Qumran scrolls, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, and notes the work's purely text-based conclusion that the non-Masoretic evidence offers little support for the Documentary Hypothesis.